Complimentary rides around town! Yeah, we thought that'd get your attention. See a Chevy. Catch A Chevy. At the Convention Center or anywhere downtown 8:30 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. Take a break, and let us do the driving.

Slide behind the wheel, and take a spin in your choice of extended-range electric Volts, a drop-top Camaro, Sonics, all-new Malibu Eco, or Corvettes. We’ll be at Trinity and 3rd from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Phone batteries fade. Laptop batteries wane. Your internal batteries need recharging, too. Come plug in at the NW corner of the Convention Center. Meet up with friends, record an interview, or just hang.

How Socially Forward is your Business? Want to find out? Stop by the IBM Future of Social Lounge during SXSW Interactive for a social assessment, see where Social Business is headed, listen in on live Conversations with Industry Innovators, recharge and refresh between sessions. Learn how IBM and their Business Partners are helping startups, developers and business leaders transform the future of business and get an invitation to our party.

5th Year Anniversary Celebration! For the last four years, the Blogger Lounge at SXSW has served as a central hub for celebrating friendship, innovation and collaboration. We are proud to announce that TechSet is once again partnering with Samsung to host the SXSW Blogger Lounge in 2012.

Recharge your batteries and your brain in our lounge, and find out about our lounge's Flash Mob Happy Hours by following us on Twitter (@AmericansElect) and via #sxaelounge.

We'll have charging stations, classic board games like Battleship, Connect Four, and Operation, videos to watch, swag, and a version of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots that we modded with donkey and elephant heads just for SXSW!

And if you happen to see a giant plush elephant and donkey walking around SXSW, they're with us. Like the two parties, they can't agree on anything. Tweet photos and videos of them in action at #donkeyVelephant and you could win your own Limited Edition Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots: Donkey v. Elephant Edition. Only five exist in the world!
More about Americans Elect:

We're hosting a national online primary this summer. Any registered voter can participate, and whoever the American people choose will be on the ballot nationwide, right next to the Republican and Democratic candidates.

We're nonpartisan, so it's completely up to you to pick this third option. We're using the internet to empower voters and circumvent the two parties. Together we'll pick a president, not a party. Check us out at www.AmericansElect.org !

The Beacon: Lounge With a Conscience returns as THE spot for cause-focused people to hang out with the best & brightest non-profit Geekerati. The WiFi will be speedy, the noms & drinks plentiful, the couches comfy and the do-gooding vibe pure awesome.

Once again, the fun-filled big top circus that is the Mashery Lounge will be back at SXSW 2012 in March. With great furnishings and flowing refreshments, the Circus Mashimus is a great place to talk API shop with Mashery folks or simply relax while catching up on email

Brands today exist in multiple mediums, defined by multiple voices. The media brands inhabit is iterative, with no beginning, no end, and little permanency. In that context, adherence to a big idea and endless repetition of centralized, fixed rules can make a brand seem unresponsive and out of step with its audience. But without repetition, how does a brand create consistency? And without consistency, how does a brand maintain value? This panel will debate, show examples and outline a new model within which experience designers show how brands should behave.

The Code is a BBC documentary about Professor Marcus du Sautoy's search of a mysterious code that governs our world through numbers, shapes and patterns. It's also a next-generation transmedia treasure hunt aimed at all ages and abilities that takes place online through games, puzzles, Facebook and Twitter, in the real world, and in Lost-style clues hidden within the TV show itself.

The Code is one of the most ambitious 'native transmedia' projects ever created by the BBC and Six to Start, and it demonstrates what's possible when a broadcaster with the reach, reputation, and quality of the BBC meets the breadth and depth of engagement that the web can provide.

In this session, we talk about the challenging journey of The Code from its inception, through design, production and delivery, we explore the best practices for making similar projects, and we reveal audience figures and engagement numbers from the experience.

Women have become the digital mainstream. In the US market, women make up just under half of the online population, but they spend 58 percent of e-commerce dollars. Women are online gamers, shoppers, bloggers, and social media consumers. And yet, we still don’t know how to design for them.

The immediate impulse when designing for women is to “shrink it and pink it,” meaning products are splashed with the color pink, and content and messaging are dumbed down. But women want what’s relevant to them. They want products and online experiences that are intuitive, not insulting to their intelligence. They want function, not frills.

This session reviews the historical and contemporary landscape of designing for women. We’ll review misguided, yet well-intentioned designs based on assumptions and stereotypes that have flopped. Likewise, we’ll review success stories of well-designed products and experiences that truly meet women’s needs. We’ll also look at when gender should factor into your design and when it shouldn’t. Ultimately, when designing for women (or men, or both), you’ll want to get it right.

On the Internet, sharing is a trap. Today's digital cult of the social - which encourages us all to share our ideas, our habits, our friends, even our possessions on the Internet - is an assault on the individual liberty of 21st century men and women. This talk - which draws off Keen's upcoming May 2012 book, "Digital Vertigo" (St Martin's Press) - exposes the illusions and delusions of social media ideologues and reveals the dangers of collective identity and behavior in our social media age. Just as Andrew Keen exposed the idiocy of the Web 2.0 revolution with his 2007 hit "Cult of the Amateur", this talk will reveal the idiocy of our Web 3.0 social revolution.

Getting Tech Savvy in rural Texas – a few of the students will join me as we present how we turned a closed, defunct, dirty library into the happening spot on campus - now including a gaming club, open mic night, library club, blogs, podcasts and more. In just three years, we've quadrupled usage numbers, encouraged all-community relations, appeared on the local news and radio, and engaged more students with technology than ever before – all at almost a tenth of the budget of the lowest performing schools in Texas (less than $2/student/book verses $16+).
Specific grants, donors, community buy-in (Laura Bush Library Foundation, DonorsChoose.org, Project Hope, Fine Arts Department, Austin Lyric Opera) have pulled together and the students are more experienced, tech-savvy and ready to work for chances to go places and get things.
We will showcase how we did it, what we used, and provide specific ideas about student use of tech at the rural level – and how to increase it.

With ethnic minorities now representing the largest and fastest growing segments of the consumer economy, the very definition of the general market is being challenged. Multi-cultural agency heads such as Translation’s Steve Stoute are eschewing their parent agencies (Mr. Stoute bought back a majority stake in his agency from Interpublic) in order to compete for a larger share of the marketing pie. In his book, The Tanning of America, Mr. Stoute lays out a compelling case for why he and many other multi-cultural agencies may be better suited to influence general market consumers than their largely mono-cultural counterparts.This panel explores the unprecedented opportunities for minority owned agencies and talent to move to the forefront of the advertising landscape. We’ll hear from key executives from GlobalHue, LatinWorks and Sanders\Wingo ad agencies as they lay out their visions for advertising in the 21st Century and the defining role minority media makers are playing in it.

With book sales going digital much faster than music sales did, why is the publishing industry growing, and not imploding? How threatened are publishers & labels as content creators start developing audiences directly through iTunes and Kindles? What does this mean for independent writers & musicians? And do our deranged copyright laws benefit anyone but profiteering lawyers? Rob Reid’s talk will compare the online challenges faced by publishing vs. music. Rob founded Listen.com, which created Rhapsody – the first digital music service fully licensed by every major label. Rhapsody remains one of the largest online music services, and is owned by MTV and RealNetworks. Now an author, Rob’s in the thick of another industry’s digital transformation. Rob’s book Year Zero (published by Random House this July) addresses some of these issues. In it, aliens seek to erase the ruinous fines on their vast collections of pirated American music by destroying the Earth. Parts of it are made up.

The role of social media has been instrumental in the more recent political and economic development of Colombia, especially overcoming a devastating period of civil strife and violence. What inspired people to protest against violence? Colombia’s former Minister of Telecommunications will discuss how social media empowered people to join the war against drug trafficking and defeat the FARC, the guerillas of the revolutionary armed forces of Colombia. We discuss their own experience growing up in a drug-funded violent country known as “narcoterrorism”, which affected every level of society and became the greatest threat to social stability starting in the late 1980s. This caused them and many others to leave the country in search of freedom. The speakers will share their insight about how social media will continue to help decrease poverty levels and increase literacy in marginalized areas in Colombia, thus improving the well-being of people and promoting socio-economic equity.

This is a “come as you are” session meant to accommodate mixed levels of experience with minimal need for special equipment or previous experience (read: no mats or yoga clothing required.) Special emphasis is placed on postures and practices to help those of us that sit at desks and use computers regularly. Much of what you learn here will help you build a home/work practice that is therapeutic and adjustable to your needs. Yoga was created thousands of years ago as a way to clear the mind in preparation for enlightenment. What better way to prepare for for the busy days of networking, information and fun at SXSW? See you there!

From the New York Times to Glamour Magazine, a universal question continues to percolate - why are women underrepresented in the tech industry? Explore the role mentorship plays in building a stronger and more inclusive community, while expanding opportunities for women to ascend to leadership roles. Panel discussion will examine the impact of women mentoring women, the positive results of enriching this community and the importance of empowering such partnerships. This panel will also look at the role men can and should play to open more doors for women in the industry. Engage, contribute and participate as a mentor or mentee! Help build a stronger, more inclusive tech community.

Your browser is the most important program on your computer and until recently there were no built-in, industrial-strength tools available for debugging web pages. As web apps become more sophisticated, so do the debugging environments. Representatives of the major browsers discuss the similarities (and differences) between the tools and we look at how they address the needs of the 2012 developer: debugging Web Workers, tweaking CSS colors to perfection, remote debugging of mobile devices and all the other functions that make in-browser development as easy as falling off a console.log().

Come join us at a special AT&T Mobile App Hackathon that will be focused on UI/UX designers and the like. We’ve lined up a special celebrity guest, Chicago Bears 7-time Pro-Bowl LB Lance Briggs, a self-admitted comic book fanatic. He’s looking for the best designers and devs to build him a mobile app. And where better to find the best than SXSW? Especially when the Official SXSW Hackathon is located smack in the center of the action at the Austin Convention Center for your convenience.

Competitors will be given 24 short hours to blow Lance’s mind by taking the concept and transforming it into an awe inspiring design, which will be reviewed by Lance himself. Finally, to really make this crazy, we’ve got over $46k in cash and prizes.
In short, this highly intense event will celebrate the unique contribution of designers and provide you with the opportunity to not only showcase your skills, but design an app for an NFL great with millions of fans and millions of potential users.

6PM - Friday Evening - Kick off event with Happy Hour where our special guest partners will pitch the app concept you will be designing.

10AM - Saturday Morning - AT&T Mobile App Hackathon. The fun continues with an all day hackathon. Work with the teams that you formed on Friday night to produce the app spec’d out the night before. Senseis will be available throughout the entire event to help you code up your solution. App submissions will be accepted throughout the day with a deadline of 7:30PM.

7:30PM - Saturday Evening. Promptly at 7:30PM, teams will begin pitching their ventures. Pitches are limited to three (3) minutes per team.

If ever Geekdom was in need of a ringleader, Joss Whedon would be a frontrunner for the position. Best known as the creator behind now iconic and cult series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly - his arsenal of other credits are what make him one of the top multi-dimensional talents today.

Other major highlights on his resume include co-writing and producing the long-awaited The Cabin in the Woods (SXSW 2012 Opening Night Film), comics such as Astonishing X-Men and The Runaways as well as the mega-popular Web Series Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. This year will see him writing and directing the much anticipated film The Avengers, and his passion project, a Jossified version of Much Ado About Nothing. Writer, director and producer are just small pieces of the puzzle that make up the creative mind of Joss Whedon. Join Moderator Adam B. Vary, Senior Writer with Entertainment Weekly, in a discussion of Joss' career past, present and future.

Back in the day, the American anime experience was limited to a couple shows on TV and a small selection at your local comic book shop. Now, anime is a multi-million dollar industry, and traditional entertainment outlets turn to anime to tell their stories with increasing frequency. Join representatives from leading anime, gaming, and digital media companies as they gather to discuss anime’s impact on pop-culture, and find out how anime impacts your life in ways you might not even suspect. From your mobile device to the movie theater, in your video games and on your DVR, anime is everywhere. It’s more than cartoons – It’s a thriving, influential culture.